SOURCE: Uma, Alladi. “What's in a Genre?: Kamala Das's My Story.” Literary Criterion 32, no. 3 (1996): 69-75.

In the following essay, Uma investigates the genre of My Story.

“My Story is my autobiography which I began writing during my first serious bout with heart disease” (Das 1991:v). The author herself has given us sanction to read it as an autobiography. So we proceed to do so, taking with us at first a lay person's understanding of what an autobiography is—factual recounting of one's life—and therefore we take whatever is written as sacrosanct truth. Then suddenly we realise that we are not “naive lay readers” but “sophisticated autobiography critics” who know the nuances of the genre. We start talking about memory, about autobiography being the creative retelling of one's life at a given point of time, about how there is no “the truth” but the truth of a given...